Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

stacybro writes "There is an article on Wired about the Top 10 most influential Amiga games. As someone who actually programmed on the Amiga way back when, I can attest to how far they were ahead of the clones when it came to graphics and audio hardware. I often wonder where the PC world would be if Amiga or Apple had had the marketing smarts (or maybe it was cut throat attitude) of Microsoft. 'Defender of the Crown (Cinemaware, 1986): Way before the Hollywood-ization of the game industry, Cinemaware evoked the era of classic movies with this game and others, such as Wings and the classic B-movie tribute It Came From the Desert. Cinemaware titles were definitely precursors of the CD-ROM era of flashy titles such as Myst and The 7th Guest. More importantly, they brought strong and realistic characterization and depiction to the world of computer games. Cinemaware is still alive today and currently working on an update of Defender of the Crown.'"

It was better on the ST- if you system linked an ST to an Amiga with a NULL modem cable the ST and let the CPUs battle, the won due to it's slightly faster CPU speed (8MHz compared to 7.09MHz (PAL)).

That may have been true on computationally-intense games, but the Amiga's custom sound and graphics hardware would have more than compensated in most cases due to them taking the load off the CPU. The ST lacked in those departments. In particular it used a variant of the same off-the-shelf sound chip [wikipedia.org] as found in many 8-bit computers; the Amstrad CPC [wikipedia.org], the later ZX Spectrums [wikipedia.org] (128K models) and even the Oric 1(!) [wikipedia.org].

It *could* do sampled sound, but the chip itself didn't specifically support this, so I assume i

It *could* do sampled sound, but the chip itself didn't specifically support this, so I assume it was necessary to keep "feeding" the chip, putting a load on the CPU; whereas the Amiga could just point the sound chip to the right section of memory and let it get on with it. This was- I assume- why ST games didn't normally feature impressive sound; also, its natively chip-generated sound wasn't even as good as the Amiga's.

I'm not sure if the Amiga's sound hardware could natively generate sound - it may have

I'm not sure if the Amiga's sound hardware could natively generate sound - it may have been sample playback or nothing. But then, with four independent channels of sampled sound, each with its own playback speed and volume, you're hardly going to complain.

Eh, that rings a bell; and I don't suppose it really matters. It'd be trivial to generate the waveforms manually, store them in a small amount of memory and point the sound chip towards them.

things did improve with the STe. That had two channels of CPU-ignoring sample playback (left and right)

That's an improvement, but hardly Amiga-beating.

Hardly any games ever used the improved abilities, of course.

That's Atari's fault; on its launch (1989?), the STe was briefly sold in place of the STFM at the same price. Whether it was originally intended that it would replace the STFM or they just ran short of the latter, I don't know. But they then sold the STFM at its old pri

No. No, no, no.I say this as a former Amiga owner/lover, and someone currently sitting at a desk with a Powerbook, a W2K, an XP and an Etch machine cranking away (very hot in here right now...). I coded multimedia apps on Amiga, recorded 3D to my PVR hard-disk-recorder, was heavily invested in my Amiga stuff.

But it became all-too-clear to me what was wrong when I showed the Amiga's NTSC-TV-resolution picture to a PC-using colleague and heard him go "oooh - gross!".

I've heard every obscure theory under the sun as to why the Amiga failed.
Folks, it's simple really. Commodore went bankrupt because the ran a bad business. No fundamental change to the technology of the platform, nor a sweeping OSS movement of the operating system was needed. Jezz, they sold millions of A1200's and the 1200 was long after Amiga's heyday.
I don't think beige cases, 15Khz video signals or the lack of business applications killed the golden goose that was the Amiga platform. The potato hea

The Amiga was released long before the Microsoft and the PC was the 800 pound gorilla of the home PC market. There was no dominant software platform. If anything, it was the Commodore 64, the best selling home computer up to that point. It was everywhere. Toys R' Us had an entire aisle devoted to C64 software -- it was Nintendo and Dell rolled into one. There was no Microsoft Office, it wasn't even on the radar. Totally level playing field as far as software goes.On top of that, the Amiga was far and

You're looking from a US-centric perspective. The Amiga did very well in Europe, particularly after the mass-market A500 came out. It only started to fail there in the early 90s, when C='s failure to keep the Amiga's spec up-to-date in the face of competition from PCs on one side and 16-bit consoles on the other proved its undoing. (Long version [slashdot.org]).

The Amiga also used to be common in TV/3D production, and that only really changed (so I believe) after C= went bankrupt, I assume because relying on a dead plat

I just realized how hilarious a statement this is. Not because it doesn't make sense - it does! In fact, an Amiga 2500 (Amiga 2000 with, typically, a 25MHz 68030 accelerator board installed, but sometimes a 68020 IIRC, but I'm talking about the '030 version) with an Emplant board is faster at being a Macintosh IIci than the real thing - and the IIci has, guess what, a 25 MHz 68030. But mostly because Apple didn't have accelerated graphics of any sort until the Macintosh II line, and the 8*24 GC display card

I got an emulator only the other day, just to play this. It's like no-ones heard of it. Everyone knows all the crap Ocean conversions and movie licenses, but Datastorm is pure gameplay. It's basically Defender 10 (or so) years on. One hard, fun game. And it's legally downloadable from the author's website here: http://www.sodan.dk/oldbits/oldbits.html [sodan.dk]

Ah, the memories that title just invoked. I had forgotten about this game. Trying to shoot the antenni off the ants, trying to bed the girl, driving from point a to point b dodging more ants, and that damn mine!! I owned my Amiga for years, and I think that I may have beaten this game once out of the millions of times I tried. They should make a repeat of this game!

That game always reminds me of the scene in Space Quest IV where you look through the "Bargain Bin" at Radio Schock and a bunch of spoof titles were sitting in there. "It Came for Dessert" was my fave...

Wing Commander was developed for the PC and later ported to the Amiga. Not the other way around. At the time of its release, I remember Roberts saying that he made Wing Commander just because everyone was telling him how impossible it was to do on the PC. Of course he kind of cheated seeing as how Wing Commander required a high-end 286. Not that it was a big issue in the long run. The Wing Commander series would push hardware requirements for many years to come, and was a driving

The 286 was far from "old hat". Many folks still had XTs or 286s. I had a high-end Turbo XT at the time, and wouldn't upgrade for another year and a half. The 486 was available, but only the richest of rich had them. They were expensive.You need to remember that there was nothing driving the upgrade cycle at the time. Many people were happy with their Commodore 64s. It wasn't until games like Wing Commander that the upgrade cycle really started. Especially when you consider that a high-end 286 was the minim

I had a 1mb 286 when wing commander was released, and bought a sound blaster especially to hear the music and speech in it. Of course you had to spend hours fscking around with EMS/XMS to get that working.

Of course he kind of cheated seeing as how Wing Commander required a high-end 286.

I first played Wing Commander on an 8086, so I wouldn't say that Wing Commander required a high-end anything let alone a 286. You couldn't run it with all graphical options on but it would run smoothly otherwise.

You couldn't run it with all graphical options on but it would run smoothly otherwise.

I sincerely doubt that. The only "graphical options" it had (other than the extra graphics if you had EMS) was EGA or VGA. I ran (or at least tried to run) Wing Commander on an 8MHz XT with an EGA adapter. It was anything but smooth. Unless you count about 5-10 FPS as "smooth". I did, however, run it on a 486. Which I only realized many years later (and after beating the game) was WAY too fast.:P

Doubt it all you want, but trust me, the first system I ever ran it on were the CAD machines in the computer lab at the college an associate of mine worked at. I was a pretty dedicated Commodore user at the time so didn't have a PC available and my buddy had a copy of Wing Commander. So we would play it at his work, a blatant abuse of university equipment that nearly got him canned, but that is beside the point. I can't remember the full statistics on the machines but I do recall they were 8086 (because

other than a slight pause during explosions the game actually ran quite well.

I'm thinking that you're remembering the game through rose tinted glasses. At the time, quite a lot of games were PAINFULLY slow. (I remember Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego being oddly faster on a CGA PCjr than it was on a beefy EGA XT! Of course, that had everything to do with fill-rates.) So Wing Commander running at 5-10 FPS probably didn't seem so bad. It really was supposed to run faster than that.:)

I'm thinking that you're remembering the game through rose tinted glasses.

I'd call it relative, not rose colored. And I will agree it certainly wasn't optimal, like running WC off of floppy, I was just saying it was playable and enjoyable on a 8086, and didn't require a 80286 or higher. The box claimed 286 12 mhz or better with Dual Floppy or a Hard Disk. Never tried it with dual floppy but if it was anything like one floppy it would have been far less enjoyable than the frame rate on an 8086. And since most sci fi movies are 24 frames per second, I can't see playing a game a

Wasn't Wing Commander a PC game first? Regardless of the answer, I absolutely agree WRT Turrican, which is STILL the most-mentioned Amiga game. BTW you can get a 32kB knockoff of the first level of Turrican [pouet.net] for windows (I believe it works on the latest wine as well.)

Marble Madness was a (near perfect) port of the arcade game, so not really an "Amiga" game, per-se. And I don't think it was really all that influential, either. There are a few maze games out there these days, but it's a pretty anemic genre.

Rather than Syndicate, I think Bullfrog's Populous was more influential. It ushered in the era of the 'god' sim. Most of the rest I can agree with, but I had never even heard of Another World, and I consider myself an avid Amiga gamer back in the day.

I think the author may have a bit of tunnel vision, insofar as the games are rather limited to a few publishers (Psygnosis & Sensible Software make up half the titles).

Never hearing of Another World is possibly because it was never an Amiga game in the US (and then it would have been called Out Of This World instead)...atleast according to Moby Games [mobygames.com].

Another World was in all the Ami mags, and it was pretty popular. I remember playing it, and getting almost nowhere near through it. (Same with all of the SotBs). Actually, a Windows XP version was released recently, and you can download the demo here [anotherworld.fr].

I'm forgoing mod points to reply and get a bit of perspective on this, because I'm suprised I missed/don't recallsome of the things that the article talks about.Rather intriguing to find out Syndicate got its start on Amiga (tunnel vision, or not).

The update to Defender of the Crown already came out a few years ago. IMHO, it largely sucked. I only played it a couple of times before putting it back into the box. I never did get the hang of the 'cinematic' swordfighting controls.

Virtually all of Cinemaware's games could have been listed, but DotC and Wings are probably two of the best examples. Rocket Ranger and It Came From the Desert are also heartily recommended.

The list in the quoted article does have some glaring ommissions. Dungeon Master was the first 3D realtime action CRPG, and I think the Amiga version was superior to both the ST and PC versions. Also woth mentioning are Populus and Artic Fox, which I think really shined in the Amiga versions. Finally, there is Faery Tale Adventure, which I think was one of the best isometic action CRPGs ever, irrespective of platform.

I seem to recall that as well (and that was at a time when the 512KB Amiga upgrade was costing about £150). I think the reason DM isn't on the list is that it was released for the ST about a year ahead of the Amiga version. I certainly remember all the ST fanboys at school using the availability of DM as one of the principal arguments in favour of the ST (that and the MIDI port).

I think the first update was "Robin Hood: Defender of the Crown". There was also a "digitally remastered version". The latest is Defender of the Crown: Heroes Live Forever [stardock.com], which looks like it has some cards thing going on in it.I think Faery Tale Adventure was great for the huge world that streamed in seamlessly off the disk. Admittedly the world was fairly sparse but at the time there was nothing else like it. It also had some pretty good music. Getting the turtle and later the golden swan to ride was

Everyone's going to have their own take on what was influential to them. I grew up playing games on my dad's Amiga (500 through 4000 over the years). My shoddy descriptions won't do them justice, but two games that were very important to me are missing:

Faery Tale Adventure:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faery_Tale_Adventure [wikipedia.org]
A giant, continuous world full of quests and tasks to run. Like most old games it was very unforgiving... you could die quickly and easily if you weren't careful. I spent hours exploring that world. I remember finding a flying goose and being able to fly across the land. Ah the memories.

Dungeon Master:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeon_Master_(compu ter_game) [wikipedia.org]
The first real-time, first person dungeon crawling game. Casting spells involved clicking a series of runes in a particular order, Fireball was Fire then Wing. On the 13th level of the dungeon was the boss, whom you had to capture in a forcecage, a very challenging battle. You could also go down to the 14th level whose only resident was a huge dragon. Food was a big issue in the game, you had to manage your food stocks carefully. The dragon at the bottom of the dungeon could be killed for a heaping pile of Dragon Steaks. To me this was the most influential game on the Amiga, it is my favorite Amiga game of all time.

I still hear the music from the Faery Tale Adventure in my head from time to time. Not that it was particularily good, it's just the game was very long and it played over and over and over. By that logic I'm sure I'll remember some Slashdot stories forever.

Never got by the darned switch puzzles in DM. DM2 was fun too. I also liked picking up items and holding them at chest height to throw them. Ninja level gained, sweet! Throwing a falchion into a bad guy was just evil.

...also known as Out of this World is one of my most favorite games of all time. I played the MSDOS version at a time when graphics were getting fairly decent. Even though Another World used very simple vector graphics, the motion capture that went into making the character animations was absolutely amazing. The art was beautiful and the original music fit really well into the bizarre fantasy/scifi world envisioned in the game. It was the first time the visuals, music, and story of a game really came togeth

Dungeon Master, yeah, now that was something. I'll add to the list- ArmourGeddon - switch between piloting one of several combat machines (heavy tank, light tank, helicopter, strike fighter, stealth bomber, and armored hovercraft) combat against the computer or another player via serial. All the simulators were quite fun to control. Sure with the BZFlag guys would get ideas from it.

- Gauntlet I and II - FOUR Players at the same time with all the good sound and graphics! Sure did the arcade version justi

Carrier Command. Now that was an underrated gem. Not certain if it was an Amiga game first, though. There was certainly a (not as good looking) PC version, and I played both at various times.Sad to say, I seem to recall some bugs in the Amiga version that weren't in the PC version. Your inventory would get screwed, and you'd have to restart your game to get it working right again. And on the PC you could send a set of walruses with a set of mantas way off on expeditions to capture other islands, as long as

SpeedBall II: Brutal Deluxe is still the most adrenaline-pumping game I have played, though the original Half Life came close. The balance and playability of SBII was spot on, the sounds complemented the atmosphere and two-player mode was immensely fun.

I think it might've been as late as 1988 when my brother and I had F18 interceptor [classic-pc-games.com] networked on our amigas: head-to-head networked air combat flightsim, with excellent color, speed, and stereo sound, when a lot of people were still using black-and-white Macs that went 'beep'. My friends in college were literally unable to believe such things existed until they saw it.

My brother and I made a paper version of the codewheel that I still have around somewhere. It was *really* difficult to get working because it wasn't just a circular sliderule, it was more of three sheets of paper in a cylinder, sliding one-over-the-other, with holes cut out in specific places so we could see the data on the inner layers. I can't remember how he generated the material for it. It was all hand-written. But it worked.

I think it might've been as late as 1988 when my brother and I had F18 interceptor [classic-pc-games.com] networked on our amigas: head-to-head networked air combat flightsim, with excellent color, speed, and stereo sound, when a lot of people were still using black-and-white Macs that went 'beep'. My friends in college were literally unable to believe such things existed until they saw it.

Oh yes! That game was cracking good fun. Used to take it in turns with a mate to see who could pull off the most outragous stunts, like touching the plane's belly in the sea without crashing, flying inverted under the bridges, or just taxiing it over a bridge.:)

I'm still enormously proud of my Cinemaware game "King of Chicago". It was Cinemaware's 2nd best-seller in its first 2 years - waaaaay behind sales of Defender of the Crown by Kellyn Beeck (250k units DoC - amazing in '85, 50k KoC - nice in sales in '86). King was definitely not one of the 10 most influential Amiga games, however, because I rolled my own interactive narrative system - Dramaton ( GDC talk on Dramaton: http://www.zogax.com/verbiage/battle.htm [zogax.com] ) - which was just a little too out there for anyone to replicate.

I did the first version of King on the Mac in '86 and then ported it to the Amiga and the Apple IIGS. I did my own art on the Mac (using digitized clay heads) but C-ware wisely redid the art for the Amiga, which had a lot to do with the big sales. Rob Landeros (who later formed Trilobyte and did 7th Guest) did the art.

Coding on the Amiga was a blast. The main online hangout for developers was BIX, the Byte Information Exchange. Simple things like screen-flipping for animation were poorly documented and there was little agreement in the first years about the best way to code them. You had to get down and dirty writing little fragments of code executed by "the copper" - the video coprocessor system.

"Cinemaware is still alive today and currently working on an update of Defender of the Crown.'" - And screwing the original game devs royally. They stripped any mention of Kellyn Beeck from their current version of Defender of the Crown and left my name off the King of Chicago credits on their website. Here's a little discussion with a current Cinemaware employee on the Indie Gamer's forum about their current version of Defender of the Crown http://forums.indiegamer.com/showthread.php?t=9738 &highlight=King/ [indiegamer.com].

At least they'll never butcher King of Chicago because they'll never figure out Dramaton.

Self-horntoot warning - I am also very proud of the game I did before King of Chicago - ChipWits - which I am reviving at http://chipwits.com/ [chipwits.com] .

I have most of the cinemaware titles on my IIgs. My kids play the crap out of DOTC and Zany Golf from EA. Never played King of Chicago. I think Cinemaware hit its peak with the release of the three Stooges:)

It's probably not one of the "most influential" Amiga games, but I have a fondness for a game called Wanderer. It was a Boulderdash clone, but with many extra features such as flying arrows and a few others traps. I really should track it down and use an emulator - good times.

In middle school back when I was playing Trade Wars like it was my job my bud had an Amiga 2000 I think and promised to show me some gaming graphics that would blow my PC away. Surely I thought nothing could top Kings Quest. He showed me one of the games on this list, Shadow of the Beast- making sure to point out the parallax insanity going on. Then I thought surely if a game comes out for the PC thats ALSO on the Amiga that they will be the same.And then I witnessed Ocean's F29 Retaliator - released on bot

Am I wrong in thinking that Maxis's original SimCity was first launched on Amiga? I ran it on my Tandy 1000 RL (with Hard Drive) in the early nineties (same computer is currently my monitor stand). SimCity has even had a modern release.

Populous I can get onboard with. That game rocked. The second was pretty good as well. And surprisingly the third one is one of my all time favorite games - I've even played it in the past year.

That is correct, I had it and played it a lot. It was similar to Sim City 2000, Had no sewer system or arcologies etc. I remember reading That Sim city 2000 was what the designer had wanted the original Sim city to be. I threw my A500 away a few years ago, just didn't have space for it and I could buy one on EBay for under $10. But I think I still have the Sim City floppies around somewhere.

All the Amiga users in the world didn't just suddenly disappear when the platform died. Lots of people who grew up playing Amiga games ended up working on games for other platforms, taking their Amiga influences with them.

I still own two Amigas, but were there really ANY "influential" Amiga games? I mean, games that were unique to the Amiga platform

Well, plenty of Amiga games were converted. Does this disqualify them?

I think the marketplace has spoken pretty loudly on this topic: if there HAD been any influential games, Amiga wouldn't have been extinguished.

By the same logic, there were no influential C64 games because that machine is also dead... huh?!

The Amiga was extinguished because Commodore did too little to improve its specs in the face of competition from commodity PCs. By the early 1990s, PC prices were falling rapidly, and their specs were vastly improved over the text-and-CGA-if-you're-lucky crudeness of mid-80s PCs (when the Amiga launched).

I should also have made clear that the Amiga was also hit at the lower end by the rise of the 16-bit consoles. In Europe where the Amiga was popular, the 8-bit NES never did big business (it was outsold in the UK by Sega's Master System!), and the market had remained much more 8/16-bit computer-based.

However, this changed with the launch of the Mega Drive (Genesis) and SNES in the early 90s. The Mega Drive in particular was better at side-scrolling parallax/plane effects, and again, the Amiga was no longe

Sure, Shadow of the Beast looked cool in the shop in demo mode, but the play of the game was worse than Atari's PitFall from ten years before. If anything, Psygnosis's legacy is "games that look better in the screenshots and demos than they do in normal play". (Oh, they also had annoyingly long cut scenes that you couldn't click through.)

ALL of Psygnosis games had the reputation of copy protection vampires: they wouldn't launch from Workbench, wouldn't copy easily (in case your Amiga ate the originals) and they were touchy as hell (couldn't run on A1200s or A500s or visa versa).

To be fair, most other Amiga games didn't run from Workbench either, and Psygnosis were far from the only company that had compatibility issues when the A1200 (or even A500 Plus) came out, due to games "hitting the hardware" directly for the performance boost.

I would say that Psygnosis did the classic Lemmings; but then again, maybe not. They just distributed it- it was DMA Design (now Rockstar North) who actually created/wrote it.

The Amiga died in about 1995... the CD32 and A1200 had poor performance compared to the 486 PC. The Amiga was better during the PCs 386, but not the 486, and many people held onto their Amigas until the Pentium.

Thing is, the A1200/CD32 were also a lot cheaper than the 486s you describe, and had they been released before the cheaper PCs (above them) and the 16-bit consoles (below) got more of a toehold, they might have done quite well.

The "cheap" PCs were *not* cheap by today's standards; however, they came with a VGA monitor, hard drive and 256-colour VGA graphics. Adding those to a base Amiga would have been pretty expensive (I never had a hard drive for mine); so I guess that was part of the attraction.

The point is, these games were first developed on the Amiga. If they got ported to other machines afterward, that doesn't make them less influential. If anything, it makes them more influential (since the presence of the game on the Amiga had an influence on other systems).

The Amiga was one hell of a machine for its time. Unfortunately -- and this is a problem which occurs with any single-source product, not just the Amiga; Macs and Palms were always (in)famous for it -- it was just too expensive. Ev

It would've been MUCH more interesting... to see what sort of innovative things people did using Amiga's fancy hardware -- especially since this is in the HARDWARE category and n...

Three words:

Newtek Video Toaster

I worked in television at the time, and I'll tell you that the damned things revolutionized broadcasting. That cute animated logo for the 6 o'clock news was a mere static card with trumpet fanfare before the Video Toaster.

Commodore didn't steal the Amiga from Atari, they simply out-manoeuvered them. Jack Tramiel (who had left C= and purchased Atari's computer division by this time) thought he had the Amiga company by the balls and could push them into surrendering the company/rights to him; he was wrong and he didn't succeed. But I'm sure it wasn't for wont of effort.

Can't say I give a toss; it went to court, and he lost. Call it bullying or not, but Tramiel was/is the type of guy who would use any means, fair or foul to

Consider also what Commodore brought the Amiga. First of all, the Amiga, Inc. people really, really didn't want to be acquired by Atari, and would have made out very poorly, financially. Commodore, as it turns out, paid them very nicely. And while I agree on the marketing side of things (C= didn't market the Amiga any better than anything else C= marketed), the technical issues were day and night, Commodore vs. Atari. Commodore did actually have a fab that could make the chips for the Amiga. They brought ad

By contrast, on buying Atari, Tramiel supposedly fired all the engineers [wikipedia.org]. I read elsewhere that they had a SID-beating sound chip lined up for the 8-bit computers... it was shelved because the people who knew how it worked were all gone. Sad...

(Would've been better than the ST's off-the-shelf sound chip as well).

Commodore did actually have a fab that could make the chips for the Amiga.

Atari always seems under-resourced to me. They abandoned the Falcon [wikimedia.org] shortly after it came out to concentrate on the Jaguar [wikipedia.org], and the Lynx [wikipedia.org] never got the breaks it deserved. It didn't help that the

I had a legal copy - so I got to read the novella packaged in the box!The story, according to that, was that you were a guy who was being hassled by a minor demon. She was making you have constant nightmares in an attempt to drive you crazy. Eventually your tiredness resulted in some accident that ended you up on an operating table, where you slipped into deep, disturbing anaesthetic-induced nightmares...

This sort of also explains the final screen, which I only got to by using the cheat code. IIRC you had t

Well, the original Elite on the BBC Model B was pretty good for its time. Bear in mind it was running on a 2MHz 6502 with just 32KB of RAM, of which 10KB was swallowed for the frame buffer and another 2.5KB for housekeeping (3.5KB on a disk-based system, but you can swap in from disk in a way you can't with a cassette).

Yes! Im sick of asking everyone if they played Frontier Elite 2 and getting nothing but blank faces. It amazed as a young gamer and amazes me more now as a programmer; written in assembler and giving the player a procedurally generated universe to explore, all on one floppy disk.

I missed playing it when it was first released (friends raved about it, however) and eventually got round to playing it many years later on a super-speedy emulated ST. It was brilliant, and this was when I was familiar with 3D accel